Subtle
Quick, what is black and white and read (ahem) all over?
I know, I know, it is a newspaper… but when I was young all I could hear was red, not read. So I never really got the joke until I was much older… too old… I am not going to tell you when the light bulb finally went off!
Ok, so maybe I am not the sharpest pencil in the drawer, but as I read my devotions today, a thought dawned on me. When we pray “save us from the time of trial” might we not be asking not for total absence of trials, which made sense to me, but rather when we are enduring these trials that we would be saved?
Like I said, maybe everyone views it this way. But I guess it just really dawned on me today.
Yes I suppose it would be nice to be saved from having a trial in the first place… but trials do come don’t they? In our book of faith 40 day Lenten Journey devotions, the author talked about when the first disciples read this they were thinking apocalyptic (I spelled that right first time out! woot!) … end of the world kind of thoughts… they were pretty sure after Jesus rose from the dead, God was done and was soon to send in the mop up crew. These were the trials the first disciples wanted to be saved from, and who can blame them.
hehehehe
To this day we hear rumors of wars and experience earth quakes and other great signs and terrible portents and we get spooked! People have been going on about the end times since… well, since I think shortly after the beginning of time. Our current culture wants to be saved as well, how else can you explain the whole Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins publishing juggernaut?
Honestly I side with Martin Luther on this one (surprise!) who when asked what he would do if he knew that the world was going to end tomorrow. In response he said something like “Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.” In other words he would keep on living has he had been living. Such was his faith in the Lord who taught us to pray “save us from the time of trial.”
It has more or less been my understanding for some time. When I was a kid the threat of an atomic Holocaust was much discussed and fretted about. After a time, I came to the realization, that you can not live in fear. That when the Lord comes, we will be saved from that time of trial. Oh we my undergo trials, but we will not be found wanting. When we see the trials that the world is under we are called as the children of God to go out into those places and save those who are under trial. We do this because our salvation is sure in Christ, the one who has undergone all trials and has not be found wanting. In Jesus we have one who has been tested as we are and yet has not found the testing more that God’s love can handle.
We are tested there are no two ways about it but as I talked about at the start of this entry. We can pray in sure and certain confidence that we will be saved from the time of trial, in Christ. And when we understand that in faith we are saved from sin, death and the devil and living in Jesus’ love and forgiveness each day, we are enabled as the body of Christ to save others in their time of trial! Whoa!
True love = Cleaning the bathroom?
Does anyone like to clean the bathroom?
I don’t think I know anyone. I know several people who don’t mind it so much, but nobody who really looks forward to cleaning that essential room!
One young lady said she knew her fiance was the one when one day when she was at work, he cleaned the bathroom for her, and had continued that practice ever since! A real keeper!
Serving one another, it can the easiest thing to do and the hardest.
Harry Wendt author of the Crossways Bible study describes Jesus, as “servant without limit.” No temptation of power, nor even the most basic human needs were enough to pull Jesus away from his service for us.
We in turn are also called to serve God and one another for Jesus sake. The week a head is Holy Week and Maundy Thursday is the start of the 3 holy days. It is in the liturgy of the church “the night in which he took the cup gave thanks… you get the point. He gave us the gift of Holy Communion, but he also served his disciples by washing their feet.
Foot washing was and in some places still a sign of servant hood and some folks even practice this as a part of their Maundy Thursday worship. For those of us in this part of the world, foot washing is well… it is just symbolic. Today we have clean streets and good shoes, back in Jesus day sewage ran in the streets and they wore sandals. Foot washing was important, but it was also disgusting… worse that cleaning a bathroom! So it was left to the lowest of the servants, to slaves and others of no social status (read women .) When Jesus washed feet he was showing his disciples they way of God was the way of loving service, not of power and manipulation.
When we pray “Save us from the time of trial” we are asking that nothing get between us and God. But our pride does so easily. We are called to 
be humble, but the need for power and control creeps around every corner. The church is not exempt from this temptation either. The greatest blunders of the church as a whole and Christians as individuals happen when succumb to the temptations and trials of power and do not humble ourselves by trusting fully in God.
But what of the Christian life. Shouldn’t there be some perk, so bonus for living the Christian life? You might want to take a look at Jesus and his life before you start going down that road too far!
I really liked what the book of faith 40 day Lenten Journey devotions had to say about this today so I am pretty much going to copy what was there.
“If I am a child of God, bad things shouldn’t happen to me, should they? So why do I have cancer; why did I lose my job; why did my marriage break up; why does my child take drugs; why is my house being forclosed? So, God, do something to prove to me that I am your child, do something to make it right.” Jesus said no to this temptation;
rather than test God’s love, he entrusted himself to God’s love.
Really that is where this petition really clicks, in our lives. “Save us from the time of trial” means when the rubber hits the road, we pray that we might trust that God will in fact save us from the time of trial so that we might live to serve God and the whole world.
Crud
The first line in the book of faith 40 day Lenten journey today was this; “The Lord’s Prayer is for ordinary people – not spiritual athletes.”
Crud.
Ok, two things.
One… I cannot see the phrase “Ordinary People” and not think of the movie by the same name. Dreadful, dreadful movie… fine it’s a 
compelling story, and it was the first movie Robert Redford directed… big whoop. You see, in my youth we thought it would be cool to go to a drive in movie. So late one fall before the drive in closed down up in Madison, a bunch of us headed up to c
atch the show… A double feature… except the movies we thought we were going to see were the ones that were there the week before so this bunch of teenaged boys got stuck watching “Ordinary People” and “the Great Santini” In today’s parlance… these were “Chick flicks” if I ever saw them… maybe it would have been great if I had gone to the movie with a date… but noooooo…
I have been emotionally scarred for life.
Anyway… I digress, again!
Point duex!
Not spiritual athletes? I didn’t catch the place where Jesus said, when you pray, if you are an ordinary person pray this way… Our Father… However, if you are a spirutal athlete, then… you can’t pray this prayer.
Fine I may be picking a nit here… but I really struggled going any deeper in our devotions because of that beginning. Now I know the 
author of our devotions wasn’t picking on the fine folks at the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, but he was picking on the smug self-righteous folks Jesus so often struggled with.
When we pray this petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Save us from the time of trial” we are acknowledging our need for help because despite our best intentions, we often make the wrong choices in life.
Our devotions use Jesus’ story of the two dudes praying at temple. One a Pharisee (SOUND EFFECT: dump dun da….) and the other a tax collector (Wah wah wah….)
Anyway the story goes this way the Pharisee bellows out his prayers stating his qualifications and his holy life style and he gives thanks that he isn’t like that pond scum of a tax collector over there. (For Pete’s sake… he did this out loud for everyone to hear, shesh you can tell he wasn’t born and raised in the Midwest!) Then it is the tax collectors turn… and he basically prays… dear Lord have mercy on me cause, whoa… I have messed up, shoot I am messed up!
The point here is that the tax collector was counting on God’s righteousness, the Pharisee… he is what we call self-righteous.
Getting back to the core of my rant, I don’t have a problem with spiritual athletes praying this prayer, because often the best of them know they can’t do it alone. Nearly any professional athlete worth his or her salt will tell you it is the coaches and team mates that make them successful. Spiritual athletes will tell you the same. It is God who saves, it is Christ who justifies, we are who we are because of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ.
Now… spiritual actors… now there is another kettle of fish! Not that 
acting is a bad profession or avocation, but if your spiritual life is all an act… uuuuboy do we have a problem. I think that was the Pharisee’s problem, his prayer was all a show… the real guy under the fancy robe and the social status was not all that different from the tax collector.
Self -righteousness is just a form of self deception, of acting, but not really being the part. In this prayer we ask that as we are who we are, 
God would come to us all; spiritual couch potatoes or spiritual athletes, the sinners, the self-righteous and whatever category you place yourself in and as we pray I hope we learn to trust that God can control even those temptations that would undo us.
Well I have gotten too wordy again… Sorry!
Blessings!
You know the type don't cha?
Oh… and I thought this was cool too. You can’t point this web site to another web site or you can type in your own words and the tweak this lovely little word picture thingy.. it is a http://www.wordle.com
It’s about us
Just got back from a band concert at the CAL center up at the Reedsburg Area High School It wasn’t just the high school that played, the 7th, 8th, and Senior High bands all had their moment in the sun, and they all played at once for the finale.
It always amazes me the progress that these kids make up through the years… The first time you hear the 7th graders play it can be, well a little tough to hear even if your pride and joy is up there. Then comes this time of year and well, they sound better… and on it goes through 8th grade and on to High School.
Maybe the coolest thing of all is they (mostly) play together and
Not This Conductor!
(mostly) at the right time and that is because of the conductor.
The conductor keeps the beat, and lets people know when they should come in and how loud or softly they should play. If someone doesn’t look at the conductor,
a major melt down often ensues… I have seen it!
Like this!
A thought struck me again about the word “us” in the Lord’s Prayer. Again our book of faith 40 day Lenten Journey devotions pointed this out… we don’t pray “and save me from the time of trial” it is save “US” from the time of trial!
We are an interconnected bunch that is to be sure. And when Jesus tought this prayer he knew that. But we so often want to isolate ourselves. To pull ourselves out of relationship, because after all it is all about me, isn’t it? Relationships are at the very core of faith. They are at the very core of who God is… I mean remember Genesis… God says “let us” hmmm… think on that for a while! From the beginning this God is all about relationship.
When I was a kid a common defense for any activity that could be judged rightly or wrongly as not exactly good was this phrase. “What happens behind closed doors between two consenting adults is none of your business.” For many that ended the argument… for me it meerly began it (I was a pain in the butt!)
Seriously when was the last time you did something that it didn’t have an impact on at least one other living soul? Ok, I can hear your wheels turning… but honestly everything we are and everything we do seen and unseen impacts us and impacts others. Maybe some of those impacts are negligable, but they are there non-the-less.
I am not saying this to set up religious police in peoples bedrooms or other rooms with locked doors for that matter, I simply want you to think about the fact that we do impact others.
Maybe that is why I like Celtic Crosses so much. The center if the cross is the cross of course… but the intertwining strands that make up this distinctive style show how things are connected to the point where you can’t tell where it starts or stops.
In Chirst we all are connected and when one of us is brought to the time of trial we all feel the effects. In this prayer we ask to be spaired from these times so that we might all of US fully live the life Christ intends for all people.
C-3PO
If you are not a Sci-Fi fan, maybe C-3PO just looks like an odd jumble of letters and an number. But for Star Wars fan’s C-3PO is well known as a protocol droid (robot) central to all of the Star Wars movies. You may not know this but there is a new animated Star Wars series call the “Clone Wars.” I don’t get to watch it often, but my son does! Recently I saw a blurb for an episode that fits out theme pretty well it was simply called, Trespass.
As I mentioned yesterday as we look at the petition “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” sins, debts, or trespasses, they all work to do the heaving lifting.
God is better at dealing with trespasses than we are!
I guess I have been partial to trespasses as that is the word I grew up using. But I like it for other reasons. To trespass put most simply is to go someplace we do not belong. If you think about it is a perfect word for what we do, cross boundaries, we play gods all the time. The boundaries we cross are not just in relation to God either, we cross boundaries in each other’s lives all the time.
Getting back to C-3PO… It seems people are trespassing all over the place, because of greed, or pride or who knows what. So in an effort to broker a tentative peace, Anakin turns to C-3PO for help — and finds his fluency in more than six million forms of communication to be most useful.
C-3PO and Luke Skywalker... more than a Sci-Fi movie?
There is only one language we need to understand when it comes to sin, debts and trespasses and that is the language of forgiveness. The debts we pile up, the sin we commit, and the boundaries we cross as we trespass are impossible for us to pay off. The Good News is that God has indeed wiped out our sins and has communicated this in the most concrete of ways in the gift of his Son Jesus the Christ.
A little now on forgiveness… Some have taken Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” as a conditional clause. If it is we are all in some serious doo doo. No, as I have prayed and studied this prayer I have heard in these words both an example and a goal. We are to forgive as God in Christ has already forgiven us. That is the promise of baptism, that is the promise of Jesus. We have the purest form of forgiveness laid out for us here, this is the example. Secondly this is also our goal, we are called to become what we already are in Christ Jesus, as we learn to forgive as we have first been forgiven.
Finally I must speak to our forgiveness of others. As our devotions stated, it is indeed a two way street. Often people who have been hurt quite badly struggle with the issue of forgiveness. This is an honest an faithful struggle not a sign of weakness. We need to learn, heal and grow from experiences where we will be called upon to forgive. It may not come quickly, it may not become perfectly, but this is why Jesus taught us to pray: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,”
Debt Relief
Finally we move off of daily bread to… “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” Umm…oh, oh… can I go back to Twinkies?
Forgiveness… sin this is big stuff. Our devotions dive into the deep end of the pool by tackling the word that causes much fuss amongst us Christians. Is it sins, debts or trespasses? There has been a lot of heat and light generated about which word “ought” to be used here, but I think they all have their place.
First off I would like to say that the statement about forgiveness is a two-way street is dead on. Forgiveness can never happen in a total vacuum. Forgiveness is at the relational core of who we are. God forgives us and we in turn are enabled to forgive as we have been forgiven. More about this later…
But for today what are we being forgiven from? Sins? That is the word we use at St. John when we pray the Lord’s prayer and I am good with that. Trespasses, that is the old school word that I used for most of my 45 years on this planet, and I am good with that word too. Then there is 
debt. Um…. as the cool kids say, I am not down with that word. Ok, that isn’t exactly right… I just wanted to say “I wasn’t down with something…never mind…
Ahem..I understand that “technically” the word used in the versions of the Lord’s Prayer we have in scripture use the Greek word that means in English “debts.” But as so often happens our little English word can’t carry the intended weight of the word. I am not going to go into detail here if you want to know more let me know and it may come back up again as we devote our way through the week… moving on…
I guess my thought is while the devotions go on about “debts” I fear that we too often feel that “debt” is something we can handle on our own. The devotions rightfully point out that our debt to God is so great that we cannot pay it. My problem comes when he starts talking about what we “owe” God.
Well, in fact, I “o
we” God everything. But I cannot pay for any of it. I am the spiritual equivalent of the mortgage crisis! Yes, I have debt, no I cannot pay it off, it is paid for me in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. For that, I live, love and struggle to live my life, not in paying back, but in fact as one big thank you note to God.
If we think that living the Christian life is paying God back for the forgiveness he has already shown us, don’t we work ourselves into a pickle? If we could in fact pay any of it back why did Jesus Christ come, why did he have to die, couldn’t he just set up a toll free number and have sin debt councilors set up a plan for re-payment?
I guess I do understand the authors point that whenever we go against God’s will for us we rack up more debt and maybe the harder we try to pay it off the deeper in debt we get. The Good News is that in Christ we are free, the debt has been
paid, canceled… wiped out! Having thus (I love that word… thus!) been forgiven we give thanks to God even as we try to forgive as we have first been forgiven!
